Married to the Mob

Film Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

"There is a delicate geometry in dreams that get away." novelist Ken Chowder has written. "It deals not with points , lines planes and solids, but with lives, with people, with the erratic rhythms beaten out by the heart." In Jonathan Demme's comedy, Michelle Pfeiffer plays Angela De Marco, a woman given a new lease on life when her hit man husband (Alex Baldwin) is killed. She leaves her sumptuous Long Island home and moves to Manhattan's Lower East Side with her young son. Angela wants to be a good person, and she sets out to refashion her life from top to bottom. The delicate geometry of her heartfelt dream brings to mind the yearnings of characters in other Jonathan Demme movies  the colorful CB users in Melvin and Howard, the aspiring loser in Melvin and Howard, and the up-tight suburbanite in Something Wild. They all want to change their lives: self-renewal is their American Dream. In this film, Angela finds a soul-mate in Matthew Modine's straight-arrow FBI agent who draws her into a scheme to nab the mob's boss (Dean Stockwell). Married to the Mob is a comic concoction that bubbles over with winsome performances and wacky surprises. Best of all is the endearing way it pays tribute to the delicate geometry of the heart.